Everybody I met, once I told them I'm from Beijing, expressed interest in the 2008 Olympics. They all want to come and watch the game. However, when I read an article from the New York Times, I am not so sure the Marathon athletes are as excited.
The article is about training to compete in a marathon held in a hot, humid and polluted city. You can read it here.
The article is long and only towards the end it brought up something I knew was true but never was willing to accept. Here's some excerpts:
"Even if the distance runners in the Beijing Olympics eat perfectly, though, they are going to face the problem of air pollution.
In March, Randy Wilber, an exercise physiologist with the United States Olympic Committee, went to Beijing to measure the air quality at training and competition sites.
“I walked around the city for over a week,” he said.
The air was not good. It had high levels of carbon monoxide, which significantly decreases the amount of oxygen that blood can carry. Added to that were high levels of ground-level ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and particulate matter, all of which can inflame and constrict the air passages in the lungs and set off asthma attacks even in people who have never had them.
“When you add in heat and humidity, with the heat index you can expect a sensation, a feeling of 90 to 95 degrees when you are outside,” Dr. Wilber said. “With prolonged exposure and moderate physical activity, you will be on the borderline between caution and extreme caution.”
The physical activity the athletes will be doing could hardly be described as moderate, however.
Parts of the 26-mile course are particularly dirty. “If any of you have driven through the steel mill district of Gary, Ind., that’s what it reminded me of,” Dr. Wilber told the meeting participants.
Air pollution can bring on exercise-induced asthma, even in athletes who never knew they were susceptible, Dr. Wilber said. But the runners cannot simply show up at the race and whip out an inhaler."
My initial reaction to the analogy is total shock, because I know Gary is the murder capital of the US and I could not accept simply by the nature of the two cities, one the capital of my motherland and where I grew up in, the other the rotten heartland and represents everything that could go wrong in capitalism. (I found a picture of Gary .) Now I haven't been to Gary, IN, but have been to Hammond, IN, which is pretty similar. While I couldn't believe he made the comparison, once I started to put my emotion aside and think about it, I must admit it was not an unfair analogy. I began to worry about my parents, who still live in Beijing. The athletes only need to stay in Beijing for a couple of weeks at most, but they are living there and breathing the air every second.
In America, celebrities are often what I call "deserving" celebrities, because most of them are 1) smart; 2) talented and 3) hard-working. Observing their behavior, I always thought they deserve to make the amount of money they make for their work, the sacrifices they, and often their family members, have to make. They take the word "professionalism" to extreme in everything they do. Including blogging.
Of course, most celebrities are too busy to write a blog, if people like me only have time to update a couple times a month (although I'm trying to pick up). But many have found it a good marketing tool--after all, they are all confident that the more people know about them, the more they'll be liked, and the easier for them to sell whatever they need to sell. (I think this notion is generally true here in the US, however I am not sure about its applicability to celebrities in China. It's more often the case that the more we know about a Chinese celebrity, the less we like them. But this point deserves another blog entry by itself.)
Getting back to my list. I subscribe to two blogs by American celebrities.
The first is Marc Cuban's Blog Maverick. Yes, this is the guy who became a millionnaire at the age of 32 and a billionnaire at the age of 41, when he sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo at the peak of the dot com boom.
What do I like about the blog? Marc Cuban writes his blog exactly as you see him on TV--bold, unabashed, intelligent, thought-provoking and always looking at things from a different angle. The only difference is now he has unlimited space and time (constrained only by his own time) to preach or market whatever he wants to hawk. Oh, did I mention he's also a master seller? I have never seen a person like him who can sell anything he wants to (ok, so he doesn't want to sell everything). Just look at this entry in which he solicited new ideas for attracting people to cinemas. He offered to give the person with the best idea a job in his company--not easy since the bar is very high and so many people who would kill to work for him read the blog. Even without finding anything worthy of the prize by his criterion, the entry itself already made enough buzz to market his company.
Reading the blog, with its no-apostrophe rapid-fire style, you can even envision how fanatically Marc typed away in front of his computer--just like him on TV. I once saw him giving an interview on ESPN before this year's NBA finals. He was talking while exercising on a stairmaster while making jokes of Shaq. (Ignore the idiotic title the uploader gave for the video.)
He's done other interviews on the same stairmaster in the finals. To be able to speak--let alone telling jokes--while exercising just shows how smart the guy is. I have never seen anyone taking interviews while exercising, and probably never will on anyone other than Cuban.
Well. Enough about Cuban. I'm running out of time. Guess I'll continue tomorrow. Just so you don't go to bed unable to sleep, the other American celebrity blog I read is Donald Trump's blog, the Apprentice guy and real estate fame.
I use NetVibes as my feed reader and subscribe to quite a few blogs. They fall in the following categories:
1. Friends: not many, as quite a few are in MSN Space and thus can notify me through MSN Messenger.
2. Econ blogs: such as Freakonomics Blog, Greg Mankiw's blog.
3. "Thinking" celebrity blogs:
This category includes both Chinese and American celebrities. The reason I emphasize "thinking" is because too many celebrities do not think, especially (and sadly) Chinese celebrities.
4. Major newspapers: such as Wall Street Journal's Most Popular articles, New York Times Most Emailed Articles.
What blogs do you read? I'm always on the lookout for new ones.
